The Hardening or Softening of Hating Hearts

This video series is taking a short break while Dr Moffic is away. For now, enjoy the rerun of this video with updated commentary.

Last year, on April 24, 2024, this video on “The Hardening of Hearts Over Passover: Then and Now” was posted. It was before the election of President Trump but, like now, in the middle of the Jewish 8 days of the Passover holiday, the story of the Jewish journey to freedom out of slavery in Egypt.

In the Passover story, the Egyptian Pharaoh promises, then retracts, multiple times on letting the Jewish people leave. As a consequence, there are 10 plagues that Egypt and Egyptians suffer. From a psychiatric standpoint, what I notice the most is the hardening of his heart after he is continually humiliated and blocked.

This year for Passover, I had the privilege of rewriting the section on the plagues for an Interfaith seder. I added an 11th plague on hatred:

“After each plague, Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites, and his heart grew harder—a stubbornness that could be seen as an 11th plague, a plague of hatred.”

In society over the past year, it seems that hatred has been increasing, most obviously between the country’s and peoples still at war, but also in the political divisiveness in our country and the apparent desire to reverse what is claimed to be prior wrong policies.

Fortunately, I have seen some softening of hearts among interfaith psychiatrist colleagues in listserv discussions and the production of the second edition of the Islamophobia and Psychiatry book. May we see more this coming year.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.